Digital Jumpstart Workshops 2015

​IDRH will host our annual Digital Jumpstart Workshops this year on Thursday and Friday, March 5th-6th. These free workshops are intended to provide faculty, staff, and graduate students with hands-on introductions to digital tools and practices in order to help you better manage your data, analyze text, work collaborative over long term projects, create digital editions, fund projects, and publish and disseminate your results. All skill levels, from beginner to seasoned digital humanist, are welcome.

Thursday, March 5th

Creating multi-media e-books with Scalar (Tami Albin)

8:30 AM - 10:00 AM
Watson Library 455

Description

Scalar is a publishing platform for creating media-rich born digital texts. In this session participants will be introduced to Scalar by creating an e-book, learning interface basics, working with media, content, and structure. This workshop is aimed at beginners. No experience is necessary. Participants may set up a Scalar account prior to the session.

This 90-minute workshop aims to give participants an introduction to important scholarly publication issues such as copyright, alt-metrics, and open access. Through discussion participants will become aware of some of the problems arising from conventional scholarly publication practices and gain a working knowledge of tools that will help them improve and control the visibility and recognition of their research products.

Creating a Digital Edition of a Text: From Transcription to Publication (Martha Baldwin & Laura Mielke)

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
Watson Library 455

Description

Through hands-on activities and with reference to concrete examples, this workshop will cover the ins and outs of preparing digital editions of literary texts and historical documents. In particular, the participants will be introduced to best practices for transcription of archival sources; encoding in XML that complies with TEI guidelines; annotating a document; and avenues for on-line publication. Leaders will touch on the use of digital tools such as the Oxygen XML editor and Juxta Collation software in the process of creating a digital edition. Participants need not have a specific project in mind to participate (though they certainly may), and no previous experience with editing required.

Incorporating Digital Tools into Teaching (Doug Ward)

3:00 PM - 4:30 PM
Watson Library 455

Description

In this workshop, we’ll explore a variety of web tools and apps that allow students to interpret information, explain concepts, and express ideas visually and interactively. Bring a laptop or a tablet to join in the exploration and share your own favorite digital tools. Here’s a sampling of some we’ll look at: ThingLink, Web Frequency Indexer, Dipity, ExplainEverything, Storehouse and Photosynth.

Friday, March 6th

Think differently about data and your own collections of digital items after this hands-on workshop. You will be introduced to basic data management techniques, including maintaining documentation, creating and organizing folders and files, and choosing file formats for long-term storage. You will practice these techniques on a sample dataset that includes interrelated image files, text documents, and spreadsheets. This dataset presents a number of data management challenges that may resonate with your own daily and long-term work. You will leave with practical tips for managing your own data and a firm understanding of the negative consequences of not doing so. Discussion among attendees and instructors will ensure a lively and stimulating workshop. Preparation: The dataset will be supplied to you at the beginning of the workshop. Please bring your Mac or Windows laptop.

Grant Development for Digital Humanities Projects (Bobbi Rahder)

9:00 AM - 10:30 AM
Watson Library 503 (Concurrent Session)

Description

Led by the Hall Center for the Humanities' Grant Development Specialist, this session will discuss developing grant proposals to fund Digital Humanities projects. Information provided will include where to find funding sources, reading grant proposal guidelines, developing the components of a grant proposal, writing project descriptions and demonstrating significance, developing work plans and timelines, writing abstracts, and creating budgets and budget justifications. The session will also include sharing of first-hand experience serving on review panels for the NEH Digital Start-Up Grants and other grant programs.

Participants in this workshop will discuss some of the basic problems arising from working in long term collaborative projects like team building and maintaining communication channels open. We will also look possible strategies that can help overcome such difficulties, and survey online tools for project management such as Trello and Asana to help sustain short or long term project planning. Please bring your laptop.

Introduction to Text Analysis with Python and the Natural Language Toolkit (Matt Menzenski)

1:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Watson Library 455

Description

The Python programming language is famously 'human-readable', which makes using it straightforward, even for humanists with no prior programming experience. This three-hour workshop covers the basics of text analysis in Python, using the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), a collection of linguistic tools which make Python a very powerful tool for working with language data. Topics covered include getting up and running with Python and the NLTK as well as fundamental text processing tasks such as tokenizing a text, counting word frequencies, finding collocations, finding specific words, and constructing simple plots. Workshop attendees are invited to bring a wi-fi-enabled laptop. If you've got Python (v.2.7.0 or greater) and the NLTK installed already, great! If not, you can program 'in the cloud' at Python Anywhere without installing anything on your own computer. (You will have to register for a free account to use that site.)